RF Studio x Massimo Dutti
Through this interview, RF Studio presents its practice connected to nature, the body, and materials, creating a universe where art, design, and tradition engage in dialogue through transformation, exchange, and shared experience.
Massimo Dutti’s ArtInProgress project was created with the mission of promoting the creativity of artists from around the world.
RF Studio explores the contemporary habitat as a fluid space where natural cycles, materialities, bodies, and territories exist in constant exchange and transformation.
Creative processes are developed in collaboration with various artists and communities, based on a respectful approach toward natural environments and traditional knowledge rooted in a deep relationship with the local landscape.
How did the collaboration with Massimo Dutti for ArtInProgress begin, and what particularly attracted you to this project?
RF Studio has always been drawn to fashion design, as our work is grounded in the relationship between the body, everyday rituals, natural cycles, and the environment. We create sensory experiences, exploring the body and craftsmanship as central aspects of our practice.
From our first conversations with Massimo Dutti, we recognized a shared universe: a common way of understanding process, a sensitivity to detail, and a belief in the value of handmade pieces, where quality and care in every element truly matter.
What main idea, concept, or emotion did you want to convey with your proposal for the Milan Salone?
We present a proposal rooted in the connection between two territories: the Amazon and the Peruvian Andes, and the tropical forests of Indonesia. These landscapes are linked by their biodiversity and traditions. We imagine a fluid intercultural geography, shaped by water and sustained by craftsmanship, where inhabiting means creating bonds and relationships with the natural environment through ritual and the handmade.
RF Studio explores the language of earth, materiality, and ritual at simultaneous scales: the vastness of territory and the intimacy of the human body and its specific habitat. We are drawn to works that connect these dimensions, where the immensity of the landscape meets the intimacy of the sensory. Vastness and sensoriality belong to the same continuum: a natural cycle, a constant flow of transformation. Each piece becomes land art, materialized body—both an environment and an experience, something to inhabit as much as to perceive.
How does your creative identity and your connection to Peru influence the development of this piece or intervention?
Although our identity is rooted in Peruvian territory and its landscapes, we expand the notion of territory beyond the limits of nation or nationality. We understand territory as a continuous, shared, porous space shaped by the coexistence of different communities.
From this perspective, Indonesia becomes part of this expanded identity: a constellation of relationships rather than a distant geography. As Édouard Glissant suggests, it is an archipelago we collectively inhabit, where exchange, resonance, and interconnection generate new forms of belonging.
For us, the natural world is our most experimental and creative environment. It has shaped our identity from the beginning, guiding the way we think, create, and relate—following its cycles and processes of transformation, adaptation, and continuous exchange.
How does your work engage with the aesthetic universe and values of Massimo Dutti?
We feel a strong connection with Massimo Dutti in the way of approaching materiality. For us, natural materials are forms of expression: through color, texture, and detail, each material has its own voice.
This sensitivity reveals a deeper beauty through tactile and visual qualities, as well as through the traces of natural cycles—water, sun, and mineral movements—that shape their expression and link them to specific places. The body and material meet and enter into relationship, creating an experience defined by subtlety, nuance, and the quiet strength of matter expressing itself.
What materials, techniques, or processes have been key in this collaboration, and why did you choose them?
We present a selection of pieces that come together as a universe: tiger bamboo from Java, Amazonian river clay from Pucallpa, resins and fibers from tropical trees, and Andean stones—all shaped by the movements and cycles of water, light, geology, and forests. What emerges is a continuous landscape, where what we perceive are its traces—impressions of transient and unique moments, silently expressed through materials and manual processes, entering the sphere of our intimate and everyday experience, our human habitat.
The pieces are developed through traditional and local techniques. The manual process itself speaks of a deep affiliation with the land. Natural materials and craftsmanship become a way to access this sensory dimension, reconnecting with the rhythms that shape both nature and ourselves. These fluid forces, though vast, are also present in our daily lives and in our bodies.
Across cultures, these cycles are expressed and honored through rituals, marking significant moments in life. Rituals, in this sense, are manifestations of a deeper continuity between human experience and the natural world—singular expressions of the cycles of life and transformation.
What role does the exhibition space play in the experience of the work, and how do you expect the audience to interact with it?
Rather than presenting isolated objects, we conceive this proposal as a spatial experience that allows the visitor to encounter a universe: a tropical latitude expressing the diversity of territories. Through the exhibition space, we aim to create an invisible narrative between the pieces—subtle continuities that weave the works into a small unified cosmos. A bridge between cultures, a threshold space, an archipelago of relationships.
What interests you about working at the intersection of art, design, and brand?
We understand creativity as an open field beyond disciplines: a space of connections between people, cultures, materials, technologies, and forms of expression. It is a shared and exploratory territory that resonates with nature itself, with the environment as a living ground for experimentation.
This approach is driven by a process of questioning and transformation—a kind of journey that reveals internal and external cycles, silent rhythms, and organic processes. Within this expanded field, we are interested in blurring boundaries, softening contours, and creating conditions of continuity, where distinctions dissolve and new relationships and affinities can emerge.
What would you like visitors of the Milan Salone to take away after discovering this collaboration?
We would like visitors to build their own associations as they move through a landscape of forms, materials, and sensations. It is a sensory experience where the tactile, the visual, the everyday, and the ritual converge, allowing each person to encounter multiple visions in dialogue with the studio’s questions.
